[1] She started out as a model in New York in 1939, working for Harvey Berin on Seventh Avenue, before studying fashion design.

Fogarty's clothes were easy to wear, practical, and made with casual fabrics, following the American sportswear tradition.

Anne Fogarty was born in 1919 in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, to Robert and Marion Whitney, who had immigrated in 1909 from Cape Town as part of a large Lithuanian Jewish community in South Africa who had apparently changed their names from Robert and Henrietta Gruskin, at the time of their immigration in 1908.

She modeled and worked as a stylist and publicist, including styling Rolls-Royce advertisements, until, in 1948, she secured a design job for Youth Guild, a new company that specialized in teenage fashion.

[6][7] While at Youth Guild, Fogarty developed one of her signature looks, the tight-bodied dress with a very full skirt worn over a stiffened nylon petticoat, influenced by Dior's New Look.

[9] As Fogarty was a junior size 7, with her small 22-inch waist and modeling experience, she was able to wear and show her own designs to advantage.

[14] Her designs were rarely trimmed as she focused instead on good cut and silhouette, and she favored casual fabrics such as flannel, velveteen, printed cotton, denim and linen, which appealed to a younger audience.

[9][15] In 1954, she designed her first shirtdress, a combination of a masculine shirt extending into a full skirt worn over multiple petticoats.

[6] However, the fashion historian Caroline Rennolds Milbank states that the "paper-doll" silhouette describes Fogarty's earliest full-skirted designs.

[6] In 1960, Fogarty offered casual sportswear including dresses with removable waistcoats to alter their look, and coat-and-dress sets in boldly contrasting colors.

Her new favorite silhouette, replacing full skirts, was the straight-skirted, high-waisted Empire line dress with tiny puff sleeves and low neckline.

According to a 1971 interview she did with the syndicated newspaper columnist Marian Christy, Kollmar broke his shoulder in an accident at home on New Year's Day 1971, which caused a blood clot to develop, and he died "a month later" on Anne's birthday,[7] which was February 2.

[24] On January 15, 1980, she died of a heart attack in her apartment in the high-rise building at 200 East 64th Street in Manhattan.

[30] Fogarty's principles continue to be cited by designers and historians such as Valerie Steele who has explained how they informed the costuming of Mad Men.

[31] In reference to Fogarty and Wife Dressing, Steele had earlier stated that the 1950s "ideology of ultra-feminine fashion was most clearly defined by a woman.